Dr. Buckley's Self-Help Book Blogtag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-18746872011-11-01T08:00:00-04:00A psychologist discusses the best self-help literature for life and practice.TypePadRick Blum's Gift to Therapiststag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a01156fa793ce970c0162fbc99324970d2011-11-01T08:00:00-04:002011-10-31T10:54:45-04:00The Tao of Your Psychotherapy Practice: How to Best Serve Your Clients While Maximizing Your Professional Freedom (2011, The Paradoxical Press) is psychologist Rick Blum's testimonial on building and maintaining a successful cash practice during the managed-care era. While this book is aimed at all licensed mental health professionals, it comes at a moment when many private-practice psychologists are in an existential crisis. Do we succumb to what seems like a gradual de-professionalization through drastically lowered insurance reimbursement rates? Should we fight/negotiate for more? Will we have to perhaps go to work in settings we are not as well suited...Elizabeth Buckley, Ph.D.

The Tao of Your Psychotherapy Practice: How to Best Serve Your Clients While Maximizing Your Professional Freedom (2011, The Paradoxical Press) is psychologist Rick Blum's testimonial on building and maintaining a successful cash practice during the managed-care era. While this book is aimed at all licensed mental health professionals, it comes at a moment when many private-practice psychologists are in an existential crisis. Do we succumb to what seems like a gradual de-professionalization through drastically lowered insurance reimbursement rates? Should we fight/negotiate for more? Will we have to perhaps go to work in settings we are not as well suited to, to make ends meet? Blum does not attack this environmental pressure directly. He uses the force of its momentum to make a point about private practice psychotherapy: ultimately, you are in charge of how you practice.

This is really a book about working in our field with integrity and thriving because of it. To do that, these days, you need to understand the true value of what you do by being in touch with your philosophical/spiritual essence. Then, you have to act in all of your roles according to these real values, be it with clients, case managers, paperwork or fee setting. He uses his own practice/metaphor of Aikido to illustrate this. It is really a rare window into a practice that rests on deep caring, genuine knowledge, and coherent method.

The book has another aspect to it that should appeal to graduate students and trainees not yet licensed, who may be considering a private practice career. He goes into great detail about the quality of his interactions with clients, sharing more than many of one's clinical supervisors ever will. Indeed, Blum has taught and supervised in a humanist vein for some time. His approach is nonetheless more integrative than psychotherapy research is generally comfortable with. But it is far more like what most clinicians actually do, and find works, in the real world.

If you are just looking for some quick tips on how to shift to a cash practice--and you work in a region that is not too competitive--you can certainly skip to the last part of the book and try out some of his ideas. But deciding you are worth such a shift in your relationship to the psychotherapy market, and then behaving as though you are, involves an organic process that might be helped by examining Blum's successful example in its entirety.

The Tao of Your Psychotherapy Practice is available in paperback at Amazon.com.

How to Write a Great Self-Help Book: Tip #2tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a01156fa793ce970c014e8c54796b970d2011-10-18T08:00:00-04:002011-10-18T08:59:26-04:00Make sure your book is really about something. Books--like blogs--can be boring, unoriginal, lack a theme or direction, and sometimes they are not even about a problem. Don't be that writer. Pick a topic based on something you really have a passion for. People want to travel excitedly with you. Otherwise, the laundry awaits. You don't even have to have a thousand things to say about it, if your idea is really clear and compelling. Take, for example, John Gray. I've read two of his books, and they are so plainspoken and internally repetitive that I was able to read...Elizabeth Buckley, Ph.D.

Make sure your book is really about something.

Books--like blogs--can be boring, unoriginal, lack a theme or direction, and sometimes they are not even about a problem. Don't be that writer.

Pick a topic based on something you really have a passion for. People want to travel excitedly with you. Otherwise, the laundry awaits. You don't even have to have a thousand things to say about it, if your idea is really clear and compelling.

Take, for example, John Gray. I've read two of his books, and they are so plainspoken and internally repetitive that I was able to read them in twenty-four hours each. He took a great idea that meant something to him, previously written about in a scholarly style by Deborah Tannen, and made it accessible to the rest of the human race. Now, thanks to him (whether they like it or not), most of the world is familiar with the idea that men and women have some fundamentally different relationship needs that they communicate differently about, too.

Which leads me to the second aspect of topic choice: being original. Seriously, Pema Chodron did not steal your idea. Be familiar with the rest of what's been said on your topic of interest. No excuses. It's easy to research it using the internet. Then ask yourself how your idea is different, or whether you can present an existing one in a way that makes it more accessible, or--if you're ambitious enough to enter the world of smartphone apps--more fun!

Now, what is your theme and where do you want to go with it? You have a collection of wise writings (yours, of course) that are unrelated. Stop. What is the thematic thread that runs through these pearls, that you really care about? Make a collection around this theme, and take longer to write more related entries, if necessary. Then give the book some organizing principle that will make it easy to navigate, such as the daily calendar, or a specific title to each entry that you can list in the table of contents. If all you have is a collection of somewhat random inspirational writings, with no way to find a particular one, then that and a beautiful cover will make a nice coffee table book for a few bed-and-breakfasts. But it is not a cohesive self-help book.

Lastly, a compelling self-help book tries to solve a problem. In fact, more and more, the public and its concerns are driving topics experts write on. Psychotherapist Mira Kirshenbaum (in my opinion, the best published self-help writer out there) crowd-sourced her latest--upcoming--book's topic through her website. Shoot, it may not be too late to give her your opinion on her cover design, if you go over there right now! (I'm not kidding.)

At the very least, ask your friends what they'd like you to write on.

They'll be eager to see it.

Smartphones as Self-Helptag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a01156fa793ce970c0133f2b1733e970b2010-08-13T17:19:02-04:002010-08-13T17:36:51-04:00Recently, I've seen a surge in the ability of smartphones to improve the quality of life for people dealing with all kinds of life problems from tedious wait times to social isolation to attention deficit disorder to adjustment to aging. Clearing away the smoke from the old worries about addiction to smartphones, they really do serve some healthy purposes. (Personally, I think if you have an addictive personality, you can get addicted to almost anything... ) This is one of those times--during a hot, dry summer of odd comings and goings in in my own life and those of others...Elizabeth Buckley, Ph.D.

Recently, I've seen a surge in the ability of smartphones to improve the quality of life for people dealing with all kinds of life problems from tedious wait times to social isolation to attention deficit disorder to adjustment to aging. Clearing away the smoke from the old worries about addiction to smartphones, they really do serve some healthy purposes. (Personally, I think if you have an addictive personality, you can get addicted to almost anything... ) This is one of those times--during a hot, dry summer of odd comings and goings in in my own life and those of others in my local and extended community--that I want to take time to discuss media, other than books, as self-help.

I've had my first generation iPhone since November 2007, when I moved my psychology practice to full-time. Since then I've had the opportunity to observe the evolution of the smartphone's use from a novel luxury to a common individualized tool (are you hardware-dazzled Apple or software-canny Android? Are Blackberries more your style, with their tangible keyboard, even though they may or may not work properly at all?) Do you mostly call, text, email, or play games on it?

Some people are holdouts to the smartphone, citing cost of the data plans. But I suspect some of these are the same people who avoided pagers in the 1990's and cell-phones after that. Many like their freedom and independence, and see increased capacity to communicate as a tether on their spirits. Indeed, using the location-based social networking tool Gowalla, I was able one day recently to determine that my esteemed colleague and office-mate Tim Ketterson was lunching about a mile from me, and lured him to a Starbucks in between for coffee and brainstorming. My smartphone has definitely eliminated some professional isolation for me.

When my days are very full--and most of them are--I can be late going to fetch a client from the waiting room. More than half the time, I find them engrossed in some reading on their smartphone. After I get their attention, they glide past me with a look of importance, deftly turning the magical thing off and seeming to switch seamlessly to I'm-going-into-my-session mode. I have to say here that something wonderful has happened over the past several years: people have learned how to turn their cell phones off. (What a frequent disruption that used to be, right in the middle of a psychotherapy session!)

This leads me to the subject of smartphones and distractibility. If we think of attention deficit as a problem that occurs on a spectrum from mild to severe, even many of us in the very mild range--especially empathically-attuned and/or novelty-seeking type personalities--benefit from externally-set-up cuing to return our focus to where we want it to be. Alarm-setting, scheduling, meditation apps with count-down and bell timers, texting, easily readable 'pushed' pop-up messages with priority predetermined by the user are all tools smart phones allow us to personalize with remarkable effectiveness in most cases I've seen. If there is too much else on your phone that is time-wasting and does not recharge you in any way, you can delete it. Use good sense.

Decreasing social isolation is a significant function of the smartphone, done judiciously. I only became a Facebook user myself about a year ago, having been influenced by nebulous--but common--fears about being a therapist who can be contacted via the internet. (Like most therapists, I don't friend my clients on Facebook, but sometimes do so through LinkedIn, the professional social networking app.) Most smartphone users I know use the Facebook app to stay informed about the status of their friends, as well as interests and activities of acquaintances they might grow closer to. As in the illustration I gave earlier, the apps Gowalla and Foursquare, partly by publishing through Facebook, provide the additional advantage of being able to keep informed about the interesting, or shared, whereabouts of friends you might want to meet up with informally. In contrast to predictions of Facebook mainly causing people to spend a lot of time on people they don't really care about, even some places of worship are finding Facebook makes members more comfortable and familiar with each other by using the organization's Facebook page and friending each other. They are becoming more like the beloved communities they were intended to be. Through the smartphone, the walls of these groups can extend even farther out into real life.

I am beginning to see elders buying smartphones, which can help with the above problems (difficulties with memory and attention and social isolation being until recently much more common among the elderly.) Many, of course, don't hear well, and writing is a more effective form of communication. Making writing mobile, and using Mobile Me or Google Calendars can assist the whole family in working with each other to coordinate care. Until someone with Alzheimer's forgets how to operate the phone, they can carry one themselves.

There is a learning curve to using this mode of communication. Often we must face fears of loss of autonomy and privacy in a realistic manner. For example, don't 'friend' anyone you don't want following you in some way. Also, always check the default privacy settings on each individual social networking app and reset them if necessary so that you are sharing your whereabouts intentionally.

This trend toward mobile information-sharing is not going to cease. According to Craig Silverstein--Google's first hire--and whom I recently heard speak to his hometown audience here in Gainesville, if you are not carrying a smartphone now, you will have some sort of PDA by five years from now. People are seeking information on-the-go more and more. So how can this technology best help each of us? As was always the case, we must seek to understand our own individual needs and, perhaps, be bold in trying new ways to meet them.

A Buddhist How-Totag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a01156fa793ce970c0134851d60f1970c2010-06-30T13:49:45-04:002010-06-30T20:15:58-04:00As mindfulness seems to take over psychology's town-hall talk of psychotherapy ideals, I find Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Shambala, 2006) a direct and unadorned way to "get" what I need to be doing to meditate productively, and can recommend it to my ever-mind-expanding clientele seeking relief from anxiety and other ills. I first encountered it on the writing table in my room at the San Francisco Zen Center (the late Suzuki was founder here) last year, where I went for a few days' retreat. There it sat, like a Gideon's Bible, necessary to deepen the welcome of a...Elizabeth Buckley, Ph.D.

As mindfulness seems to take over psychology's town-hall talk of psychotherapy ideals, I find Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Shambala, 2006) a direct and unadorned way to "get" what I need to be doing to meditate productively, and can recommend it to my ever-mind-expanding clientele seeking relief from anxiety and other ills.

I first encountered it on the writing table in my room at the San Francisco Zen Center (the late Suzuki was founder here) last year, where I went for a few days' retreat. There it sat, like a Gideon's Bible, necessary to deepen the welcome of a seemingly Spartan host. As it happened, I was not in the most focused frame of mind to take in much of the book, distracted as I was by my first 'real' vacation in some time, and all the Center had to offer. Monks in training offered silent guidance once I entered the temple, and led by example. I chanted unknown Japanese words with them, finally soothing my 'monkey mind' for a little while.

That first hour was one of the fastest of my life.

One chapter of this little book (I was fortunate, a few months later, to obtain from Amazon a little hardcover edition with a woven bookmark) has made a huge difference for me: the first one, "Posture" tells the reader that meditation IS the proper posture--if you do nothing else, the correct posture in itself brings joy, relief. That is not to say that when you get it right, you will not struggle. In fact, if you find it too easy, you get little out of it. Such little paradoxes in this little book brought about great change for me, straining as I was to understand what it was I was supposed to be doing during meditation.

When I'm not sure what I'm doing--once again--I return to 'the posture.'

And again, this book has returned, this time as 'reading for class' in study with Gainesville's own zen-master-in-training: Meredith Garmon. Meredith leads the Dancing Crane Zen Center held at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville. Meredith's dharma talks incorporate discussion of Suzuki's work and elucidation of koans (Buddhist paradoxical stories) along with his own accomplished philosophical bent as a professor of that subject and as a liberal religious minister.

Short, basic, self-contained chapters by a founding father of Zen in America. What better start could the beginner ask for?

A Valentine to Herselftag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a01156fa793ce970c0120a874b98c970b2010-02-10T13:53:46-05:002010-02-10T13:53:32-05:00Novelist Elizabeth Gilbert's autobiographical Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia (2006, Viking Penguin) recounts in caring and funny detail her recovery from divorce. It happens through foreign adventure, new friendships and culinary sensation-seeking. Okay, so who can afford that, financially or otherwise (she spent a year abroad), and why should most people be able to identify with that? Thanks to her own and her family's resources, Ms. Gilbert stretched the boundaries of her ability to experience herself alone, in a way that inspires one to think of postdivorce self-discovery as a potentially, profoundly,...Elizabeth Buckley, Ph.D.

Okay, so who can afford that, financially or otherwise (she spent a year abroad), and why should most people be able to identify with that? Thanks to her own and her family's resources, Ms. Gilbert stretched the boundaries of her ability to experience herself alone, in a way that inspires one to think of postdivorce self-discovery as a potentially, profoundly, rich and rewarding gift. As painful as the loss is for her--and she was one who wanted out of the marriage--she learns to laugh at herself as well as find amusement among the displaced Americans and pidgin-English-speaking locals wherever she goes.

I think of it as akin to the universal postdivorce task of getting out and re-friending your old and neglected friends, making new single friends, rebooting your spiritual practice if you have/want one, and letting yourself find out how different and possible everything can feel when you do it alone.

And at the end, she does fall in love with a good guy who genuinely loves her in return.

The Hallmark holiday of Valentine's Day is rife with opportunities for single people to feel deprived, rejected, and unworthy. But Gilbert does with her entire year what I often suggest to my clients they do for an upcoming feared/hated holiday, which is to ask herself how she wants to spend her precious time and then make solo plans around that.

Along the way, the oddly down-to-earth Gilbert discovers some not-so-appealing qualities in herself. For example, even in the most meditation-conducive environment of an ashram in India, she can hardly tolerate stillness, repetition, silence. This is in spite of having followed this particular guru for some time back at home. As is the case with most human frailties, however, this one turns out to be a strength in disguise, earning her a sort of quietly-buzzing-around, official cruise-director position at the facility. Whoda thunk?

So if you need--or know someone who needs--a dose of imagination and exploration to launch the experience of singlehood in a more positive direction right now, consider experiencing the sweet success of Eat Pray Love. And do it before it's all glamorized by the upcoming movie starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem!

One Inspiring Coupletag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a01156fa793ce970c01287695e5e9970c2009-12-31T20:16:28-05:002010-01-01T10:45:39-05:00For the New Year, and the end of the old, I wanted to present a positive example of a couple that seems to make things work in many of the ways the problem-solving books I've discussed this year recommend. Their story is not a conventional one, so if your sensibilities are offended by flawed people being held up as an example, read no further. But, it's likely you enjoy reading regardless, since you're still here. So I'd like to discuss the 'twin' memoirs of Michael Chabon and his wife Ayelet Waldman. Michael Chabon is a fiction writer inspired by the...Elizabeth Buckley, Ph.D.

For the New Year, and the end of the old, I wanted to present a positive example of a couple that seems to make things work in many of the ways the problem-solving books I've discussed this year recommend.

Their story is not a conventional one, so if your sensibilities are offended by flawed people being held up as an example, read no further.

But, it's likely you enjoy reading regardless, since you're still here. So I'd like to discuss the 'twin' memoirs of Michael Chabon and his wife Ayelet Waldman.

Michael Chabon is a fiction writer inspired by the countless comic books of his childhood (he's 46.) His memoir, entitled Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son (2009, HarperCollins Publishers), is the more artfully and subtly composed of the two works. He was a writer first, before they met. She was a Harvard-educated public defender first, and after experiencing the clash between the pull of motherhood and the demands of her career, became a stay-at-home-mother and then a writer.

Waldman's memoir, entitled Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace(2009, Doubleday) is direct prose that engages you transparently. Waldman attracted significant media attention when in a piece called "Modern Love," she discussed loving her husband more than her children. While this couple is quite liberal in their politics and willingness to expose their mistakes, the idea that you attend to your own needs first, then your marriage, then your children, then everyone else is one I not only espouse in my own psychotherapy practice, but have seen talked about by rather conservative social commentators. Nonetheless, many people found this idea shocking in the age of child-centered education, parenting and everything else.

It's been said that the success of a marriage depends more on the maturity of the husband than anything else. If he still wants to be cared for the way his parents did in his childhood, he can never properly take his place as equal caregiver alongside his wife. As you read Chabon, you see how his father leaving the family taught him how to be alone, to appreciate and respect the support of his mother, who had to go back to school after her divorce, and how to share himself with his own children--indeed, to want to share himself with his children. When he (briefly married once before) meets Waldman--according to her memoir--he had already envisioned himself a stay-at-home-writer-father. In other words, he had thought out his adult family role by himself instead of leaving the construction of his family to some future mother of his adulthood.

Waldman, for her part, discusses how her dissatisfied, pre-feminist mother pushed her to seek equality with men in all things and sexual self-expression. Her resulting strength swung her between the extremes of boring, passive boyfriends and mutually exploitative one-night-stands. Meeting Chabon broke the cycle. (It is particularly funny to compare the couple's different accounts of the incentives they were given to go on a blind date together.) Her ambitiousness in nailing him down with an early marriage proposal was a counterpoint to his big-picture consideration of the usefulness of being a househusband. There was lots of chemistry (in anthropologist Helen Fisher's terms, she is probably a DIRECTOR/Explorer and he a NEGOTIATOR/Explorer, a highly complementary personality combination.)

Because Chabon was raised with the same 1970's gender equality education she was, Waldman found a man who cooks, cleans and nurtures the (four!) children naturally. So, she's not angry with him, and voila, she still desires him.

And, when she needed to make a career change, he was responsive and supportive of that which would make him the primary breadwinner for awhile.

To top it all off, Waldman is bipolar, given to extreme mood changes that make her at times rather unpleasant to be around. The couple, as couples researcher John Gottman would approve of, have found a way to fight "bombastically", get it out of their systems and then get back to liking each other before bed. There are 'repair attempts', and she takes her bipolar energy outside the house for awhile until she is "bored or tired." They have found "what works" for her bipolar contribution to the relationship.

Without using the exact words, Chabon credits his wife's extraversion with getting him (the introvert) out in the world. He works conscientiously to try to understand his two daughters' emerging femaleness, but in the end hands over what feels like an overwhelming difference to his wife ("go ask your mother.") While he silently takes himself to task for this, his wife remarks on just how different things are for her daughters than they were for her, although she still wants to support their sexual self-expression as her mother did hers.

Perhaps it is self-awareness in each of these writers that has made as much of a difference in creating an adult marriage as anything else. But clearly there is also the humor on both sides (comical descriptions of the changes in Waldman's body through childrearing, for example, that have nonetheless done little to diminish the couple's physical affection for each other.) And most of all, there is the element of having chosen well to begin with.

Revolutionary Mindstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a01156fa793ce970c011570dd5805970c2009-07-07T14:08:33-04:002009-07-07T14:07:23-04:00As I get ready to go north for a working/learning vacation in Cape Cod, it occurs to me I want to lighten up the blog for a couple of weeks. The trouble is that other than reading People magazine in the kitchen at my office, my taste runs to heavier reading, even on vacation! That said, I noticed a theme in my readings in some different genres this season that I thought would be fun to share just now: revolutionary minds. It's summer in Florida. If you don't live here, just take a moment to consider the implications of that......Elizabeth Buckley, Ph.D.

As I get ready to go north for a working/learning vacation in Cape Cod, it occurs to me I want to lighten up the blog for a couple of weeks. The trouble is that other than reading People magazine in the kitchen at my office, my taste runs to heavier reading, even on vacation! That said, I noticed a theme in my readings in some different genres this season that I thought would be fun to share just now: revolutionary minds.

It's summer in Florida. If you don't live here, just take a moment to consider the implications of that... now that you're warmed up, consider that a young Stetson University student gave his life in the early morning of July fifth running his Disney monorail train into a parked one... while across the Magic Kingdom a new, audio-animatronic President Obama had come to life. Beneath the Disney blacktop, Disney imagineers create miracles and risks every day that we take for granted. What's underneath the all-American surface of our lives that's really interesting and worthwhile?

That same weekend, while working out, I caught portions of two televised specials concerning the work of writer/historian David McCullough on the American Revolution. One was a documentary on the Military Channel (my gym pays for this channel, I don't!) and the other was a 2005 interview on Book TV C-Span with the author. I read 1776(Simon and Schuster, 2005) and a couple of his other books two years ago, and got an education in the texture of life back then that I am still absorbing and personalizing. I see the local fireworks as something almost eternal, now, essential as they have apparently always been to our celebrations as humans. I also think more and more of my ancestors: officers, wives, footsoldiers, and children, who bravely or ignorantly took their lives to the limit in support of the Revolution. McCullough talks movingly of bare feet leaving bloody tracks in the snow--without tears or sentimentalism, but with a look of you'd-better-pay-attention indignant pride. It's enough to make me want to put socks on, and it's 93 degrees outside! So while this isn't intended (and really is not) a self-help book, let's just say it is not possible to feel sorry for yourself and read 1776 at the same time. Enjoy.

If you're in the mood for fiction, Revolutionary Road(1961,1989:Vintage Books) is another recent read that struck me as having an unusual depth of psychological consciousness. The book was recently re-released with the 2008 movie. It is a cautionary tale of a 50's modern couple who dares to plan an escape from their pretentious suburban east coast lives and live according their real values in Paris. The only trouble is, only one of them is genuinely capable of carrying through with the plan, and the other one has a hidden agenda. The ending is tragic, but inevitable, all things of the era considered. Still, it makes you think about what could happen to any of us if we avoid risk and change when the stakes are high. Will you take the Revolutionary Road, or not?

Writer Malcolm Gladwell, whom I enjoy watching when he is on CNN, is one of our revolutionary thinkers today. Even more revolutionary is that licensed therapists can now earn continuing education credits for reading his books and taking a test on them. His books, among them The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Back Bay Books, 2002) and Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown and Company, 2008), have made their way into our house in recent months. My husband, who--like Mikey in the old Life Cereal commercial--hates every (book) I bring home and won't (read) it, devoured these rapidly and licked his fingers afterward. I look forward to digesting them myself, and especially Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Back Bay Books, 2007), too, as it looks the most like a self-help book.

I don't know yet what I'll read on this vacation. Maybe I'll bring a mix of genres. I just hope I'll get under the surface and find something to change my mind about.